Penalty up: Pay Rs 20,000 for each unwanted call, rules TRAI - National News – News – MSN India - News

Penalty up: Pay Rs 20,000 for each unwanted call, rules TRAI - National News – News – MSN India - News
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Penalty up: Pay Rs 20,000 for each unwanted call, rules TRAI
Mumbai: In an attempt to curb the menace of telemarketing calls on mobile phones, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has revised penalties to be levied on service providers and telemarketing companies for making unsolicited sales pitches.

The telecom regulator will now impose a fine of up to Rs 20,000 on operators for letting tele-marketing companies make unsolicited calls. This is compared with the earlier fine of Rs 500 per telemarketing call made from an operator’s network.

Every telecom service provider who does not comply with the provisions of the regulations will be fined up to Rs 5,000 for the first instance. The operator could be fined up to Rs 20,000 every time the offence is repeated, Trai said in a release on Monday.

The regulator has included these clauses in the ‘unsolicited commercial communications (UCC) 2008’ by amending the regulation.Prior to the amendment, the regulator had suggested it will levy a flat fee of Rs 500 from defaulting operators and telemarketing companies. However, the regulator had given the power to service providers to disconnect erring telemarketers’ lines.Trai had announced the UCC regime in June 2007, but the policy did not have much teeth to check the menace.

“The objective is to increase the effectiveness of compliance of these regulations by providing financial disincentive to non-compliant telecom service providers and thereby reduce the nuisance and inconvenience to the subscribers of telephone and mobile services from unsolicited telemarketing calls and messages,” Trai said.

In October, Trai set up the ‘national do not call’ (NDNC) registry to list the numbers of users who did not want to be troubled by telemarketing callers. Around 1,522 million subscribers have listed with the registry, while 13,600 telemarketing companies also got registered with it.

Source: Business Standard